He comes back to the hive with the same noisy, careless fanfaronade, and is received by the workers with the same sullen indifference. They give him his fill of bee-milk, linking tongues with him as he sits up like an overgrown baby, voracious, clamouring to be fed. They suffer him to swill at the honey-stores unchecked, but plainly regard him with contumely. He is a terrible expense to the State, yet a necessary one. Silently they go about their uncongenial business of nourishing him—silently, and with an ominous patience. They grudge him every drop, and, all the more, urge him to his excesses. It is not for long. The day of reckoning is near at hand. Already the poppies glow scarlet on the hill—the poppies that mark the turning-point of the summer; and after them the long decline, with its ever-diminishing sun-glow; each day with a scantier meed of blossom, until the path runs again into the dreary levels, the sober greys and russets, of winter death. Now the worker-bee is to show a grizzly seam in her nature, matching ill with the fine hues and qualities of mind for which she is so justly famed. And that she is not all lovable, all admirable, accounts for the exceeding love of her that moves the hearts of men who know her through and through. The story of the massacre of the drones has hardly a parallel for sheer relentless ferocity—unrecking abandonment to a vengeance long withheld for expediency’s sake. There come the first chill nights of mid-July, and the honey-flow is suddenly at an end. The clover and sainfoin have already fallen to the sickle. Nothing but the bravest warmth and exuberance of the summer could now withstand the drain of the myriad honey-makers, and a few hours’ cold dams up at once the attenuated stream. The time of prosperity is over. There will be no more abundance of honey. It remains for the genius of hive-economy to prove how much of what has been gathered can be preserved for future needs. The first sign of the _débâcle_ is the throwing out at the hive entrance of certain pale, gruesome objects—the corpses of immature drones, not dead from mischance, but ruthlessly torn from their cells. This may go on intermittently for many days, and while the fell work is proceeding the living drones seem to take no warning. They keep up their merry round; the unending feast riots forward; daily the bee-garden is filled with their careless, overweening song. And then at last the signal for the slaughter is given. Within each hive a curious sobbing outcry begins—a cry that is nothing but sheer terror put into sound. The drones no longer lie in easy ranks between the combs, placidly sleeping off one debauch and dreaming of another. They are all awake now, and fleeing abjectly for their lives through the narrow ways of the bee-city, the workers in hot pursuit.